Juliet Wiersema, associate professor of art history at the University of Texas at San Antonio, has received the 2025 Arvey Foundation Book Award from the Association for Latin American Art. She was honored for her book The History of a Periphery: Spanish Colonial Cartography from Columbia’s Pacific Lowlands (University of Texas Press, 2024). Through examining rare, hand-drawn maps of a long-overlooked part of the Spanish empire, the book provides insight into how New Granada was shaped to serve political and economic interests.
As a scholar of pre-Hispanic and Spanish colonial art, Dr. Weirsema focuses her work on cartography, architecture, cultural heritage, ceramic technology, and acoustic artifacts. In addition to The History of a Periphery, she is the author of Architectural Vessels of the Moche: Ceramic Diagrams of Sacred Space in Ancient Peru (University of Texas Press, 2015). She is currently working on a new book regarding English cartographer William Hacke’s hand-painted maps of the Spanish South Sea.
Dr. Weirsema holds a master’s degree in the history of art and archaeology from New York University and a Ph.D. in art history and archaeology from the University of Maryland.